Sunday, 18 November 2012

Next year WECS is 40 so in celebration the society has
decided to do a second round of something it did for its 25th. Enter
Patterns of Fashion II. The morning meeting was to get together volunteers and
divide into 4 (or 5) groups. Each group is going to recreate a garment from
Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion. The four garments chosen are:

c.1931-2 Fuschia pink silk
chiffon in the Museum of Fashion Bath.

c.1798-1805 Morning dress in
white cotton with a small purple pattern in Salisbury Museum

My group is the Eleanora and two lucky people (not me) are
going to Florence to have a look at the original. We have indicated our skills,
plain sewing, pattern cutting, embroidery, materials sourcing, etc. We have a
goldwork expert who is teaching others how to do the goldwork embroidery, and
we have less than a year so it is going to be busy.

In the afternoon we had a talk by Chris Seals of
Farthingales, seen above in his hussar outfit. He makes Napoleonic period military costume, examples of which can also be seen here.

For those who are uncertain who this was, Henry Prince of
Wales was the elder son of King James VI of Scotland and I of England, and his
wife Anne of Denmark. As the exhibition says when James succeeded Elizabeth in
1603 it was the first time in two generations that England had had a “normal”
family consisting of the King and Queen and their three children, Henry,
Elizabeth and Charles, though the last was considered so sickly he was left
behind in Scotland. The exhibition is an assessment of the life of Henry, who
died at the age of 18 some 400 years ago this month.

The exhibition is divided into six sections with a wealth
of paintings, some of which have not been seen in public before. I have
included links to copies of a few of the paintings that are in the exhibition.

The first section deals with the family and includes
paintings by John de Critz and Robert Peake who (from 1607 until Peake’s death
in 1619) were jointly Serjeant-Painter to James. Here are paintings of all the
members of the family, the King
and Queen,
by de Critz and miniatures of them by Hilliard and Oliver, Princess Elizabeth
and Prince
Charles by Peake, and several of Henry himself including one of him in his
garter robes by Marcus
Gheeraerts the Younger. The most poignant item however is a letter from the
nine year old Henry to his mother, assuring her he is in good health.

The second section is about the prince in his own
household, which was established at the Palace of Nonsuch. There are paintings
of the members of the circle who surrounded the Prince at Nonsuch, and a well
known portrait of Henry
with a young Earl of Essex (who later commanded the Parlimentary army
against his brother King Charles in the Civil War. There has been much argument,
based on the image I have linked to, as to whether the collars have a blue
starch. The collars on the painting, as seen in the gallery, are white with a
very slight caste of green from the doublets underneath. It is an object lesson
in not taking the colours that appear in online sources as true.

The third section is on festivals, masques and tournaments
and includes several sketches for masque costume, as well as a very strange
portrait of Henry
leading Old Father Time by the forelock, two sets of Henry’s armour and several
miniatures of Henry in armour.

The fourth section is on Henry’s collecting, and made me
wonder if Henry’s collection of paintings and renaissance bronzes influenced
his brother’s collecting habit, which has been explored in Jerry Brotton’s book
The
sale of the late king’s goods.

Henry did not leave the UK, but the fifth section explores
his links to the wider world, and his interest in ships. The painting by Adam
Willaerts of the Embarkation
of the Elector Palatine 1613 is interesting for its depiction of ordinary
people standing on the foreshore in the bottom right hand corner. The section
also has portraits of his extended family, his uncle Christian IV of Denmark,
his brother in law to be Frederick Elector Palatine, his godfather Henri IV of
France, and Maurice of Nassau.

The final section deals with Henry’s death on the 6th
November 1612, from an illness now recognised to have been typhus. It includes
post mortem notes, and a well known portrait of Queen Anne
in mourning, but most poignant are the scant remains of the wooden effigy of
Henry that was created and dressed in his robes as Prince of Wales and placed
on his hearse.

One is inclined to ask what if Henry hadn’t died? What if
Charles hadn’t succeeded James I as Charles I? Would we still have had a Civil
War? it is a very good exhibition, and if you can’t get to it the book is
excellent.